Sounds Like with Sean Chen
Wednesdays at 5:01 p.m. and 10:01 p.m., Thursdays at 12:01 p.m. and Saturdays at 7:01 a.m.
Beethoven and Billy Joel? Electric Vehicles and Arvo Pärt? Brahms and Jiminy Cricket? Experience unexpected musical connections and custom mashups with Sean Chen, award winning pianist and Jack Strandberg/Missouri Endowed Professor of Piano at the UMKC Conservatory.
Have a mash-up idea for a future episode of "Sounds Like with Sean Chen?" Submit your idea HERE!
“Sounds Like with Sean Chen” is made possible with support from the UMKC Friends of the Conservatory.
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Composer Robert Schumann loved puzzles and secret codes. In his music, he snuck in secret love letters, and paid tribute to musical heroes. -
John and Yoko...and Ludwig? Did Ludwig van Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata inspire John Lennon to write "Because" from the Abbey Road album? The similarities are fascinating. -
For Gustav Mahler a symphony must embrace everything: life, death, nature and love. -
Barry Manilow thought he had come up with an original musical idea, but later realized it was Frédéric Chopin's all along. -
Video game composers like Koji Kondo have a unique challenge: the music must function on repeat—looping, yet foreshadowing. If you take Kondo's music out of its digital soundscape, does it evoke Satie or Chopin? -
Is "Chopsticks" the most famous piece of classical music ever written? “The Celebrated Chop Waltz,” as it was originally titled, was composed by a 16 year old girl. It was her only published work, but boy what an impact. -
Franz Schubert and Ludwig van Beethoven created poetry at the piano, but what does it have to do with Pterodactyls? -
From rippling water to beams of light, composers like Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy figured out how to translate the visual into something you can hear. -
There’s no controlling the weather, but composers attempt to harness its power to create musical drama. -
Of the "Scene by the Brook" movement from his Symphony No. 6, Beethoven said that " the yellow buntings overhead, the quails, the nightingales, and the cuckoos composed with me."
